First Impressions

[liv]

compare a tiny litte pic from civ 5 with that big one from BE? that is a little like apple and oranges

My graphics are looking a lot clearer than the one you are posting so maybe it is a setting or a graphics card or something.

 

[Gort]

compare a tiny litte pic from civ 5 with that big one from BE? that is a little like apple and oranges

My graphics are looking a lot clearer than the one you are posting so maybe it is a setting or a graphics card or something.

OK, so show us a better comparison. Those pictures were just the first ones to come up on Google, so show us a drab Civ 5 picture versus a vibrant, beautiful BE picture?

 

[Lord Tirian]

OK, so show us a better comparison. Those pictures were just the first ones to come up on Google, so show us a drab Civ 5 picture versus a vibrant, beautiful BE picture?

He wasn't criticising the picture itself but the size of it. Wikia is resizing the images grabbed off Google Image search, try this one for size:

Spoiler :

I don't think "drabness" in itself is bad but it needs to be used properly. If you have a (literally) dark game, you really need to take advantage of the contrast it produces with bright UI elements, SFX effects and so on. Civ 5 did so very well in reverse. The game world is bright, saturated and colourful, as a result, the UI is usually kept in darker colours with a much more limited colour palette and flatter more "painted" buttons and icons, resulting in a clear visual language.

Civ:BE has the problem that it uses said darker design direction for the UI and the game world. In addition to that, it can never quite figure out what it wants to look like. It flips forth and back between using very polygonal shapes (the rectangular labels) and smoother elements (look at the research indicator in the top right or the extra indicators on city labels (i.e. stuff above and below the main rectangular label)).

EDIT: It's not a completely terrible UI, it works in most places and I've seen worse but it certainly doesn't hit the consistency and aesthetics of the Civ 5 UI which does both very well (and the things that don't work that well in the Civ 5 UI aren't so much problems with the design of the UI and more with what information the designers wanted to make available).